I don't get to lie in bed long though because soon there's a knock on the door, Louis goes to see who it is and I scrabble to make myself relatively presentable. Turns out it's the forensics investigator, a short woman with a bottle full of silvery dust and a brush. I stay out of the way by sitting on the bed using my netbook to browse while she works. I don't pay too much attention but I hear snatches of conversation. They were wearing gloves so there were naturally no finger prints, there was a footprint on the desk as well as the window sill. She took the footprint anyway in case they could match the boot treads to anyone.
Soon the topic of their dialogue moves to small talk, like what course Louis is studying. He's studying computer engineering. The next phrase uttered by the investigator makes my ears prick up.
"So you're a whiz with computers then?"
Wait a second. I KNOW that line. I proceed to listen intently for what I know is coming.
"So if I deleted my iTunes library, is there any way to get it back?"
Yes, it's a technical support question. The first line of the exchange has to be among the top ten of classic tech support question lead ins. It's an oft repeated tale:
1) Person meets person.
2) Person discovers other person knows something about computers.
3) Person asks computer person how to fix their shit.
I digress at any rate. Louis probes the subject a bit more to find out exactly what the problem is. Turns out that the library is no longer on her computer but she still has the stuff on her iPod. However she can't sync the iPod to retrieve the data from there because iTunes being the control freak software that it is will instead wipe it. I chime in from time to time, I feel sympathy for her in this case due to my own harrowing experience with iTunes. Still without access to the device or computer we both give up on troubleshooting it and defer the issue by suggesting she take it into the Apple store.
She leaves and I follow not too long after having made plans to meet my former room mate Nathan in the city for lunch. Louis stays behind to do University work so I make my goodbyes and set off towards the station. In the course of getting to the city center I have to make several calls to Nathan to let him know I will be late, even more late and "I'll just call you when I get there". Sadly while the trains are useful they couldn't be any more unreliable than they already are. I was stuck waiting at the station as the train was delayed for about 10 minutes, spent about 10 minutes at a complete standstill in a tunnel and about 5 minutes actually on the platform waiting for the train doors to open. This on a journey that should normally take 10-15 minutes total.
Nathan is understandably annoyed at me but I dismiss his ire by foisting the blame on the rail delays. We set off to go get something to eat. Turns out we both want to go to different Japanese restaurants for lunch. I want to go to the bentou (lunchbox) restaurant and Nathan wants to go to a place that does ramen (noodles), he wins annoyingly and we head off to the ramen place. He has beef ramen and I have a vegetable tempura Japanese curry, the food is quite nice as usual but I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get more tempura. I try to eat my meal with chopsticks but give up fairly quickly and ask for a spoon. It's not that I'm bad with chopsticks, quite good in fact, but even the Japanese eat their curry with a spoon. We pay the bill and then go down the road to Starbucks for coffee and a dessert.
It's in the Starbucks I marvel at the modern convenience of technology and how we abuse it for the most stupid things. There's a youtube video I want to show Nathan so I pull out my netbook and set it up on a chair. Starbucks has WiFi but I'm not sure if it's free and if it is how I gain access to it. Being too lazy to find out I then tether my phone to my netbook to get internet access. All to watch the following video:
Technology gives us the amazing ability to access the internet nearly anywhere these days and people like me use it for stuff like this. It's at this point I decide to head home, I say farewell to Nath and head off to the station. The rest of my day is fairly uneventful.
Until I wake up around 2am of course.
My right toe is in an agonising amount of pain and is throbbing horribly. I think I must have caught my toenail on something in my sleep, it's the only explanation I can come up with right now. I try dozens of different things to try and relieve the pain: running it under ice cold water, putting an ice pack on it, massaging it in various ways. No luck it still really hurts. I manage to find some painkillers at some point and by about 5am the pain has subsided enough to sleep.
Work was fun the next day.
As an update of sorts I found out on Tuesday that stuff was in fact stolen from Louis's house. Apparently one of his house mates is now missing a significant portion of his Xbox 360 games. Suspicion is that it was a couple of kids or teens, otherwise they might have been smart enough to steal the more valuable goods.
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Great series! Still curious as to who broke in... if you find out, please let us know.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow... enjoyed the post. Keep it up!